The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World Read Online Free PDF Page A

century BCE . One offshoot turned east from the Santa Cruz Islands or Vanuatu toFiji, an open-water distance of about 450 nautical miles. Their descendants pushed on to reachTonga andSamoa by about 950 BCE , the date of the earliest human habitation in WesternPolynesia. Although kinship ties and trade between colonies and home islands may have sustained two-way communication between them following their initial settlement, interisland ties gradually loosened. Nonetheless, Polynesians generally regard Tonga and Samoa asHawaiki, their ancestral homeland.
    After about seven centuries of settlement, there was a resurgence of exploratory seafaring during which Western Polynesians began to venture east and south.A number of sequences have been suggested. A recent theory holds that around 200 BCE Samoans and Tongans reached theSociety Islands, while settlers of theMarquesas Islands farther east and north came from Samoa. Five hundred years later, voyagers from the Societies and Marquesas reachedEaster Island, which is less than a third the size ofManhattan and the most remote island on earth, more than a thousand miles from its nearest neighbor, Pitcairn, and nearly two thousand miles from South America. Around 400 ce, voyagers from the Societies and Marquesas reached Hawaii. The last major wave of Polynesian settlement spread from the Society Islands southwest to New Zealand around a thousand years ago.
    The chronology ofMicronesia’s settlement is not as clear, but the small, widely dispersed islands appear to have been reached variously by people from island Southeast Asia, by a northern offshoot of the Lapita people from Polynesia, and by Melanesians from the Bismarck Archipelago. (A less likely scenario involves settlers coming directly fromTaiwan.)Guam is the largest and one of the westernmost islands in Micronesia and the earliest material finds of human habitation date from 1500 BCE . The sketchy archaeological record suggests that people began arriving in theMarshall Islands, about a thousand miles east of Guam, by the first century BCE and in the Carolines, which are closer to Guam, shortly thereafter, but further research may reveal a different sequence of events.
    What prompted the Lapita people to work their way into the open waters of the Pacific is unknown. Population pressures were probably not a factor, and the distances involved were too great and the volume and value of goods too modest to make trade worthwhile, at least on a scale we can comprehend from this vantage. A more likely possibility depends on the nature of Lapita society, in which birth order and rules of inheritance may have forced or promptedgenerations of the disinherited to make their way in the world on their own. It may have been mere curiosity, but if the Polynesian voyages were a case of discovery for its own sake, they would have no real parallel—at least on a sustained level—until the polarexplorations of the nineteenth century. Whatever their rationale may have been, as in any exploration the crucial underlying factor was the confidence that they could return to their point of origin. By and large, the human settlement of the Pacific was the result of deliberate calculation and not of accident or “splendid recklessness,” a fact borne out in the oral traditions of Oceania.
    Fishing is a major leitmotif in Polynesian mythology, one that accounts for the very existence of the islands and for humans’ discovery of places from Hawaii to New Zealand. According to one tradition, the first expedition to New Zealand was led by afisherman namedKupe from Hawaiki, which in this instance probably refers to the Society Islands. The story relates that the fishermen of Hawaiki kept losing their bait to a school of octopi until their leader, Kupe, decided to give chase—all the way to New Zealand. Kupe evidently anticipated a long voyage and his canoe,
Matahorua,
carried sixty-seven people, including his wife and their five children. After killing